Reagan u-turn on economy

Last Tuesday evening, President Reagan performed what is very nearly the oldest ritual of the American government, a form of government which has very few rituals indeed. He delivered before both Houses of Congress, assembled in the House of Representatives, together with the nine justices of the Supreme Court, his Cabinet, the diplomatic corps and other distinguished visitors, the so-called State of the Union address.

This custom was prescribed in the second article of the constitution: 'The President shall, from time to time, give the Congress information of the state of the union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.'

The prescription of 'from time to time' leaves it up to the president to address both Houses whenever he feels like it but the State of the Union address has come to be an annual affair given in January as soon as possible after a Congress assembles for the new year's work.

George Washington, of course, gave the first State of the Union address and he excused himself at once from recommending any measures at all. Everybody present had been, until 14 years before, a subject of the British Empire. Now they were nationals of a new nation, an invented system of government and Washington spent most of his time marvelling at the great constitutional charter 'under which you are assembled' and paid tribute to the members of this first Congress.

For the first ten minutes or so, I should guess, he went on about the great anxiety he felt on assuming the office of president. He'd had, he swore, to resolve a terrible conflict between the voice of his country calling him back to duty and his immutable decision to remain at Mount Vernon, a retreat which 'I had chosen with the fondest predilection as the asylum of my declining years'.

The Senate responded to the first president in language equally flowery, expressing their enormous gratitude for his decision to leave the retreat 'consecrated to the repose of your declining years'.

It seems a pretty glum note to start on but it is true that he was, by the mortality figures of the time, an old man. He referred more than once to the anxieties that were bound to flow from his taking on the presidency 'in the evening of my life'. Well, let's face it, he was 57! Of the 39 succeeding presidents, only ten have been older than Washington on the day of their inauguration. Oldest of all in the 200 years of the republic is one Ronald Wilson Reagan who was 70 two weeks after his inauguration and who will be 72 on Sunday week.

Well, Mr Reagan did a great deal of 'recommending measures necessary and expedient' and the necessity of them must have pained him because most of them were surrenders to the opposition, which has been rising not only among the Democrats, but in his own party as well. When he'd finished, the network commentators descended like a flock of buzzards on the meat of his speech and debated whether Mr Reagan will run again in 1984 which would let him out of the White House just before his 78th birthday.

There's always a lot of such talk at the beginning of a president's third year because it's always the time when the glitter of the new man is dimmed, when all the glorious promises of his first days in office can be measured against what the man has done.

I remember at the first press conference President John Kennedy held at the beginning of his third year. A reporter for the New York Times asked him, 'Mr President, what happened? What happened to the momentum?' The president, of course, had to pretend that the momentum of his glory days was still there, that he was just getting his second wind but the fact is that, at that time and for the remaining ten months of his life, there was something like 90 bills that Kennedy had put up to Congress which Congress had either shelved or buried in committee or was doing little about. It's also a fact worth recalling that within three months of Lyndon Johnson's accession to the presidency, more than two-thirds of those bills had been brought to the floor of both Houses and voted on. That was because Johnson had a gift – which is rare among presidents – of cajoling and bullying Congress and persuading and buttonholing his opponents and, as he used to say, 'sweet talking' them into voting his way.

I think you can say, as a general rule, or rather as a sad deduction from the record, that there are two kinds of presidents. There's the burning idealist and there's the level-headed realist. Of course, during the race for the presidency, during the campaign, all the runners have to pretend to be idealists and nobody seemed like a more genuine and more genuinely American idealist at the start than Jimmy Carter. His appeal was to the simple decencies, the rural Mark Twain shrewdness to populist sincerity. After Nixon's Cadillac and trumpeters in skin-tight, white knee-britches, Carter banished the trumpeters, disdained the Cadillac and walked back from his inauguration down Pennsylvania Avenue holding his wife's hand. He looked, then, like Jefferson after Washington.

Jefferson, who rode alone on his horse to his inauguration, tied it up, had his say and returned to his boarding house, having expressed himself rather acidly about George Washington's love of ceremony, his gilded coach and outriders and a fondness for display that Jefferson thought 'tended away from Republican simplicity and towards monarchy'.

Well, Mr Carter gave his first television address to the people dressed in a cardigan. His aides were encouraged to sit around in jeans and open shirts. He abandoned the old practice of having a marine band play 'Hail to the chief' wherever he appeared. It took him less than a year to learn that the people don't want to see their president in their own, informal guise. 'Hail to the chief' piped out again. Mr Carter got himself up in what they used to call his 'Sunday go-to-meeting' suit.

His aides adopted collars and ties and steadily, down the accumulating troubles and complexities of the four years, Mr Carter abandoned, too, his folksy manner because he was too honest and intelligent about the problems that were coming at him thick and fast. He appeared at press conferences and in television addresses and he talked in his grey, verbose but knowledgable way about the actual complications of the government he was in charge of. He saw four or five possible solutions to every problem and was frozen in his stance not knowing which way to turn. He could no longer match his simple campaign rhetoric with the tedious facts of life he was discovering.

It seems to happen in democracies that the people crave first a world-saver and then a humdrum sensible man. Then, possibly, back to another world-saver. After Lincoln, Andrew Johnson. After Lloyd George, Bonar Law. After Churchill, Attlee. After Roosevelt, Truman and, after Carter, the all-American ideal of a clean-cut Midwestern boy, Ronald Reagan, who cut through all the awkward complexities of social security with a plea to help your neighbour, through the difficulties of living with the Russians with a massive arms build up, through the labyrinth of the tax system with a yearly ten per cent cut in taxes, slashed through the awful complications of government itself by demanding that we 'get government off our backs' and was going to reverse the meteoric rise in the government's budget deficits by simply shooting the budget down to earth and declaring, by law, by a constitutional amendment, that the budget had to be balanced.

It was all so rousing, to a nation struggling through the quagmire of Carter's statistical reports and aching for simple answers, that Reagan came in by a landslide.

Well, in two years, the people have discovered that there are no simple answers – Mr Reagan, too, though he still yearns for them – but what was most significant about the State of the Union address was not what he put into it, but what he left out. Hardly a word about a balanced budget, except he hoped it might happen by the end of the decade when, even if he ran and won again, he would have been out of office for two years. Certainly, no more talk of a constitutional amendment to make a balanced budget compulsory. He'd promised to balance it by 1983 but, by now, there's the prospect of a $200 billion deficit. No mention, either, of a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal and gone with the wind and the old rhetoric is all talk of a new federalism which would throw the obligations of welfare and education and health care back to the states.

As for taxes, his closest disciples in his own party have warned him that there will have to be more taxes disguised under any other name – contingency funds, revenue enhancements, whatever.

The most significant sentence in the whole speech, the sign of a dramatic retreat from his old battle cry, 'Get the government off our backs' came in a very undramatic sentence. The whole place rose to him, the Democrats by pre-arrangement. They'd seen the text of the speech and their leaders cued them to be ready for it. It was simply this: 'We who are in government must take the lead in restoring the economy.'

It was a startling admission that the private sector is helpless alone, that government has an obligation not to get off our backs, but to offer the main helping hand and that 'government' meant the president and the Congress, together.

The thundering response to that simple sentence must have puzzled the watching millions until some of them, who read newspapers, learned that Mr Tip O'Neill, the Democrat's leader in the House, who is also the speaker of the House, had focused his wily eye on 'we, in government' and said to a caucus of his party from both Houses, 'That's it! That's what we'll hold him to.' It's practically an ultimatum to the president that he can have no more cuts in domestic programmes unless he matches them with whacking cuts in the defence programme.

At the end of it, the question was aired, 'Will he run again?'

The answer seems, to me, to be fairly simple. His approval rating is now lower than that for any president in recent history at the beginning of his third year. If unemployment goes up through the summer, he will surely decide to return to the mountains behind Santa Barbara to that 'retreat which he has chosen with the fondest predilection as the asylum of his declining years'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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